This is really cool....but, are people getting the wrong idea? (and just for the record...this skepticism does not come from my faith. In fact, my faith allows for the possibility that God may someday *want* us to continue to colonize the universe....I'm not a science denier....just a realist)
What I mean is this. The Kepler is taking readings based on shadow patterns from suns that are a very long way away. Based on that, we have, in fact, discovered that there are planets which orbit similar suns at a similar distance. We can judge their size, the distance from the sun, and the length of orbit. And that's FANTASTIC. But beyond that, aren't we jumping the gun a bit? The photos that are being circulated with this article are not even real, but I'm not sure everyone who reads these articles knows that. They just see an artist's rendition of what it may look like and conclude that we have pictures from space of "another earth"... I mean, we don't even know if there's water on the thing.
I love the science, but I get frustrated when a lot of hype and hope turns into a lot of false "facts"...